climate and weather

Steve Sopinka has been discussing with us a project to develop a climate zone map for building.  The climate zone map for planting tells you what species of plants will survive in specific areas and is well known to gardeners.  Calgary is zone 2b because of its elevation, the mountains and its chinooks, föhn winds that come from Pacific weather systems and which wreak havoc with plants who wake up on a balmy January morning thinking it is spring only to be blasted with -30 the next week.  Within zone 2b however there are frost pockets and warm spots.  I live in the lee of the downtown with all those tall buildings blocking the wind and giving off heat and so I can garden to zone 4.  North Bay is zone 3b . Vancouver Island is mostly  7a and b, parts of the Fraser River delta are zone 8, meaning they can grow almost anything.

There is a building corollary to all of this: with each climate zone come various fine-grained built responses.  Tarps, amusing as I find them, are one.  For example. 

We are launching a call to contribute to a database of local building traditions.  This database will include specific examples of local building habits, from form to roof slopes to door placement, with a hazarding of why things are built the way they are.  The stepless door, so famous in Newfoundland, is not about climate, or weather, or materials, but is about social propriety.   The ubiquity of the tarp, a building material in its own right on the west coast, is not about propriety, it is about rain. 

This project is outlined on this page: climate zone building responses.  A rather dull name, but you have to start somewhere. 


Comments

[Dick Averns]

The notion of tarp archaeology is intriguing: such a term is apt for the process of uncovering, as described in the texts that accompany some of the the images. But the sense of ownership ascribed to the variously wrapped objects would suggest a different term: tarpitecture. Apropos the work of Christo and the recently late Jeanne-Claude, tarpitecture is also symbolic of everything from the bivouac to emergency shelters, and has an already established vernacular in the realm of installation art and informal architecture. Tarpitecture.

[stephanie]

I think tarpitecture would mean the tectonics of tarps. Tarp technology is vast, from materials, to guages, to weave, to grommet style and spacing, to the rope edges. Oxfam has developed a tarp for emergency housing which has a black nylon reinforcing grid making them nearly indestructible. There are tarps impregnated with insecticides, tarps that resist UV degradation. This isn't difficult, nor is the use of tarps difficult or particularly arcane.
What defines a vernacular architecture involves more than technology; it also is a cultural act. It is a repeatable use of form and materials in a way that is specific to a particular region. Wood is used for building all over the world, but how it is used in different places is largely cultural: traditions of wood joinery, etc. We don't talk about wooditecture, and neither should we. Of course there are tarps all over the world. Like shipping containers, they are made in China and can be found literally everywhere on the globe.
What I have found is that moving 600 miles west, in a wealthy western country, presents a different attitude to the use of tarps. This is infinitely more subtle than Christo's acres of plastic; this isn't about poverty and emergency shelter, it is material culture found in a very small section of a Pacific coast town.